Daily chess puzzle: Check Mate #500

November 21, 2017

Another puzzle from Dragoslav Andric’s 1981 book “Matni Udar”.

White to play and win

Quist v unknown, Helsinki 1980

Solution

A lovely puzzle to bring Matni Udar to an end.
I was pleased to find the lovely solution, but when entering the position into my Stockfish app in order to print the positions, it told me there are other ways to win. 1Qe7 for instance is very strong, and is the engine’s first preference, but only in terms of +5 instead of the +4 given for the game continuation: 1 Nf6!!

I have recently been on a wonderful weekend course in Edinburgh with Jacob Aagaard. One of the tenets Jacob repeatedly made to us, which I am trying to learn from, is ‘slow down’: calculate slowly, and I have been trying to do so, so far with results. So I fixed the position after 1Nf6 firmly in my head whilst looking at Black’s various defences.
Many are easily dealt with; the only interesting one being 1..Neg5 (or 1…Nfg5) when I found the lovely finale 2Qf7!! (Stockfish prefers 2Rh7+ after 1…Neg5 winning the queen after 2…Qh7 3Nh7) which I think is a very fitting move to end the coverage of this book.